ZZT - Where are they now?
Mar. 26th, 2008 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnBeing one of the last survivors of the ZZT community not to have drifted off into insanity, I am immeasurably fascinated with ZUltimate. It's a wiki that was set up about a year after I ran off after deciding I could no longer understand the community, and documents the people it attracted and the arcane in-jokes they built up over 15 years. Picking through it is like some sort of twisted electronic archaeology, uncovering layer upon layer of its unique form of organized madness and trying to translate it into something understandable. This is a decent example of the hive mind sort of mentality of it all - I don't know what it is about an ASCII-based game creation system that attracts these people in particular, but the minds in this place are truly unique.
I'll start with the obvious. I was slightly surprised to discover last year that Chase Bramlage murdered his girlfriend. (I should mention that no-one knows for certain what happened, either of the event itself or the outcome of his trial, but all signs so far seem to point to him being incredibly guilty.) It could be because I never really talked to him very closely during my time there because as far as I remember I was only intermittently in the forums and chatroom, but somehow this doesn't even seem very unusual. It's probably better to move swiftly on from this...
Less disturbingly, in general, quite a few members of the community tend to be associated with a variety of colourful (sometimes quite psychedelic, actually) substances. In fact I seem to recall that last time I poked my head into the chatroom one of the people there was in the process of having his door battered down by an irate dealer, but I could be remembering that wrongly. Drac0, for example, is now allegedly quite into his crystal meth, but with the amount of sense his games made before that habit started I don't think you'd really notice.
Mooseka went for a different approach, as out of all the substances he could have been caught taking, someone walked in on him when he was busily trying to ingest nutmeg via his nose. And then decided to tell the community in general about this, ensuring he would be mocked mercilessly for generations to come. I don't think that even this matches the sheer inspiration of burstroc, though. It seems that after a considerable amount of usually relatively harmless cannabis, he somehow believed himself to be Blat Hoople and proclaimed himself the President of Water.
By the way, if any of this is making any sense then I'm not telling it right. Even the less dangerously mental people sometimes had their moments - the ZZT community is one of the areas in which my usually good memory fails me, so I have no idea what I thought of all these people at the time, but I think that Wildkarrdex might have been someone that fell into that category. He did, after all, give a glowing review to one of my own little productions saying it was "nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be", and made a cameo appearance in another. I don't remember him being an administrator at any point, but according to the article, he was:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kjorteo, dr_dos, until recently danbodaxter who now goes to the same university I went to, and someone from the forums who occasionally pops up on my journal telling me to come back). And let's be honest, that's an improvement too.
One significant thing to be born from the community was created by Misteroo, who after several years around the ZZT and Megazeux boards reached such an advanced state of mental decay that he managed to produce the Arfenhouse series. (I have to confess that I actually wrote the rest of this post more than a year ago, never got round to putting it up, and everything you've read up until now was just an attempt to make it relevant again.) In the old days we were happy shouting things like "GREEN IS EVIL" and "OOF MON WHERE'S ME PIE" at each other over the forums, but from that chaos and disorder came... well, more chaos and disorder, actually, but packaged up neatly in the form of this series.
If you're not familiar with them, they're a series of Flash cartoons that allegedly involve someone called Joseph who is trapped in a dodgy Flash animation. Most of the storyline, or at least what's coherent of it, involve the Housemaster (who happens to be a slice of bread with some MS-Painted limbs around it) and the other inhabitants of the Arfenhouse - the heads of a dog, a cat and blue sphere named Woogy - being harrassed by a malevolent yellow ball with eyes on it called Billy. Though to be honest what actually happens in any of the animations bears very little resemblance to this plot outline. Subtitles are provided in something resembling the Dadaist language of FishIg. In a way it's quite an accurate model of what the ZZT forums would look like if they were somehow physical - a thought that is frightening indeed.
Let's be clear. You will not get this. Or this. I don't understand most of it. It will appear as a string of gibberish to the uninitiated, and a marginally more coherent string of gibberish to those who were in the community at the time I was standing around at the sidelines trying to make sense of it. My entire introduction to the Internet consisted of said gibberish.
I really miss it sometimes.
I'll start with the obvious. I was slightly surprised to discover last year that Chase Bramlage murdered his girlfriend. (I should mention that no-one knows for certain what happened, either of the event itself or the outcome of his trial, but all signs so far seem to point to him being incredibly guilty.) It could be because I never really talked to him very closely during my time there because as far as I remember I was only intermittently in the forums and chatroom, but somehow this doesn't even seem very unusual. It's probably better to move swiftly on from this...
Less disturbingly, in general, quite a few members of the community tend to be associated with a variety of colourful (sometimes quite psychedelic, actually) substances. In fact I seem to recall that last time I poked my head into the chatroom one of the people there was in the process of having his door battered down by an irate dealer, but I could be remembering that wrongly. Drac0, for example, is now allegedly quite into his crystal meth, but with the amount of sense his games made before that habit started I don't think you'd really notice.
Mooseka went for a different approach, as out of all the substances he could have been caught taking, someone walked in on him when he was busily trying to ingest nutmeg via his nose. And then decided to tell the community in general about this, ensuring he would be mocked mercilessly for generations to come. I don't think that even this matches the sheer inspiration of burstroc, though. It seems that after a considerable amount of usually relatively harmless cannabis, he somehow believed himself to be Blat Hoople and proclaimed himself the President of Water.
By the way, if any of this is making any sense then I'm not telling it right. Even the less dangerously mental people sometimes had their moments - the ZZT community is one of the areas in which my usually good memory fails me, so I have no idea what I thought of all these people at the time, but I think that Wildkarrdex might have been someone that fell into that category. He did, after all, give a glowing review to one of my own little productions saying it was "nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be", and made a cameo appearance in another. I don't remember him being an administrator at any point, but according to the article, he was:
He used this position to spend his time reading everyone's private messages, and changing forum names into German translations of Twin Peaks episode titles. Administrative privileges were eventually removed when he added a word filter changing the letter e to something like "mumumumumumumumumumu", rendering the forums utterly unusable (but in this author's opinion, substantially improved).And as for me... all things considered, I think I got off lightly. In fact I never really considered myself one of the in-crowd, not really understanding the mentality that a lot of the community shared, and it was enough of a surprise to discover that someone had honoured me with my own page that wasn't even particularly damning. I am still in contact with a couple of people in the community, but a completely different set of people from the ones I knew when I was still in it (who, yes, all right, are
kjorteo, dr_dos, until recently danbodaxter who now goes to the same university I went to, and someone from the forums who occasionally pops up on my journal telling me to come back). And let's be honest, that's an improvement too.One significant thing to be born from the community was created by Misteroo, who after several years around the ZZT and Megazeux boards reached such an advanced state of mental decay that he managed to produce the Arfenhouse series. (I have to confess that I actually wrote the rest of this post more than a year ago, never got round to putting it up, and everything you've read up until now was just an attempt to make it relevant again.) In the old days we were happy shouting things like "GREEN IS EVIL" and "OOF MON WHERE'S ME PIE" at each other over the forums, but from that chaos and disorder came... well, more chaos and disorder, actually, but packaged up neatly in the form of this series.
If you're not familiar with them, they're a series of Flash cartoons that allegedly involve someone called Joseph who is trapped in a dodgy Flash animation. Most of the storyline, or at least what's coherent of it, involve the Housemaster (who happens to be a slice of bread with some MS-Painted limbs around it) and the other inhabitants of the Arfenhouse - the heads of a dog, a cat and blue sphere named Woogy - being harrassed by a malevolent yellow ball with eyes on it called Billy. Though to be honest what actually happens in any of the animations bears very little resemblance to this plot outline. Subtitles are provided in something resembling the Dadaist language of FishIg. In a way it's quite an accurate model of what the ZZT forums would look like if they were somehow physical - a thought that is frightening indeed.
Let's be clear. You will not get this. Or this. I don't understand most of it. It will appear as a string of gibberish to the uninitiated, and a marginally more coherent string of gibberish to those who were in the community at the time I was standing around at the sidelines trying to make sense of it. My entire introduction to the Internet consisted of said gibberish.
I really miss it sometimes.
